Insulation should be upgraded when planning your custom home

When you are planning to build a custom home there will be many questions you will need to answer about what kind of home you want to build, one of those questions is how much insulation do you want to install in the walls of your new home?

To answer that question you need to figure out some numbers, those numbers will have to come from your general contractor.

When you raise the amount of insulation in the walls of the home it raises the cost of the overall insulation in the home. The more insulation the higher the R-value in the home.

When insulation is increased in the home the amount of energy it requires to heat and cool the home decreases. The less energy it requires the more money that you save on your heating and cooling bills for the lifetime of the home.

When you are planning to add insulation to your home to the point that it will be constructed above the minimum insulation code requirements you then will have the ability to decrease the size of your heating and cooling system. Doing this will save you money on the cost of the overall heating system upon installation.

The calculation that you have to work out with your general contractor is the point where the adding of insulation stops saving you enough money to be cost effective.

To help figure that point out you take the cost of the extra insulation and deduct the costs that you believe it will save you in energy and then add the cost savings of the reduced size of the heating system.

The point toward where you want to get too is where you have $1.00 to $1.00 insulation installation to overall savings.

You don’t have to stop when you reach that threshold, you can add more insulation over that point if you take into consideration that energy in the future will only be going up, this will increase the amount of savings the farther into the future you calculate the numbers.

The great thing about insulation is that it never wears out; it never goes away and will always be in the walls. That means that in the future when you decide to sell the home the extra insulation becomes a bonus to any perspective homebuyer and should help the resale value of your home.

The optimum wall insulation for a highly insulated home is R-40, if you want to super insulate your homes walls you should be aiming for R-60. These values are double or triple the minimum code requirements in the building codes that are currently enforced today.

Remember when planning to build a new home you should be spending more time thinking about the insulation then you ever did before. These choices could end up costing you money well into your future if you don’t decide on the proper level of insulation, but choose appropriately and it could save you a lot more money than the extra added monies to your mortgage.

Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.